I love New Year’s Eve. To me, it’s a glamorous holiday that offers the sparkle of new beginnings and a moment’s pause for present blessings. Time, which usually flies by unnoticed, slows and is savored during this celebration of retrospective gratitude and forward-facing goals.
In honor of my favorite holiday, I am recommending a book to jump-start your best-year-ever intentions for 2016. The Joy Diet by Martha Beck offers a menu of ten behaviors you can add to your way of living and thinking to enhance your daily journeys for a more vivid and satisfying existence. I know, that’s quite the promise, but I have found The Joy Diet to be both a short-term solution to crisis and a long-term solution for satisfaction. I refer back to it often and use its contents to check and balance myself as needed.
Martha Beck is a Harvard-educated life coach and monthly columnist for Oprah’s Magazine, O. Beck writes with a comedic, trustworthy tone and supplies her readers with personal anecdotes and real-life examples on tackling the obstacles that keep us feeling anchored in unhappy circumstances. The ten menu items that make up The Joy Diet and structure the book include nothing, truth, desire, creativity, risk, treats, play, laughter, connection, and feasting. A free worksheet available on Beck’s website breaks down the menu items with challenges and to-do lists to get you on your way to a happier, more fulfilling existence.
This book has been instrumental in teaching me effective ways to overcome seemingly insurmountable dilemmas. Pick up The Joy Diet, and many other inspirational reads at the Sioux City Public Library. And don’t forget, we have countless materials to help you achieve wellness in 2016, including exercise DVDs, fresh food cookbooks, and motivating music.
